OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION - Cyberwar-Netwar: Security in the Information Age - page 101

young people began to buy the phones and it again became the leading company. That is
using the same system.
Handy : In all fairness, every story has two sides. I can take that same story of the
telephone with the camera and show how it can serve a very good purpose. Some
teenagers were stranded somewhere and one was injured, so they just flashed their
camera onto the 911 centre. Their location could be pinpointed and a life was saved.
Everything has it good points and its bad points and it just goes back to how responsible
society is.
Valente : One of the initiatives that the US is thinking about regarding security is
precisely the use of the decentralised distributed network of cameras, by using mobile
phones or personal web cameras where the government in unable to cover the whole
country with web or with cameras. If you can leverage that decentralised distributed
network of cameras to provide security, then you can do something that a hierarchy
cannot do. I would, however, like to come back to what you were saying about
consumers being restricted because of freedom of expression and join that to a couple of
other points that we have referred to. This brings us to another problem that I think we
will have to deal with, which is that consumers can encrypt their own communications.
Yesterday we were talking about PKI, cryptography and information value. If indeed we
had a way to monitor the whole world's information flows and to assign a value to them,
we could probably identify terrorist information flows and be able to identify threats. The
problem is that very quickly, not only those organisations that understand that their flows
have value, but also customers will begin more and more what has been proposed here as
cryptography as a way of defence. But, as those organisations start to use something that
we think of as a defence or a weapon, it will start to be a problem for NATO and nations.
People will understand that their information flow has value and so they will encrypt it,
thereby diminishing its value and also thereby escaping Big Brother monitoring. And I
think that is something that we will have to deal more and more with in the future.
Currently the US classifies cryptography or certain levels of it as a weapon of mass
destruction. Is that the way to go? Is it a good idea to classify viruses as a weapon of
mass destruction? If we do that, we will not have the opportunity to gain gradual
immunity. We will only discover about viruses when they are killer viruses. Should
NATO also consider cryptography as a weapon of mass destruction, make it illegal and
pursue people who are using strong encryption techniques? Or should we bring
cryptography out in the open, so that it can be used by all? I think that one of the future
problems will be more and more about whether or not information flows are mandatorily
transparent and whether or not organisations and people are able to use cryptography. I
think it is something that will have to be dealt with from a security and defence point of
view.
Handy : Sometimes you have to look and see what the damage is, not what the
damage could be. In today's environment, are the rogue actors using cryptography as a
medium to proliferate weapons of mass destruction? Are they using viruses to propagate
the same kind of thing? And, is the damage so great that the world has to come together
and re-look at how these things are used? We came to that conclusion after all the
chemical and biological weapons were used in World War I or, as in certain cases, where
some nations have been using them within the last decade or so. At that point we decided